"Hardware is hard.” -Ancient VC Proverb --- “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard” -John F Kennedy Hardware is hard, but doing hard things well is the only way to build a long term competitive advantage and generate excess returns. Software is a tremendous opportunity, but the IMF suggests that digital activity represents less than 10% of...

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that “bitcoin is a bubble, but blockchain is interesting” over the last few months. With everybody from Kodak to Long Island Iced Tea cashing in on the hype, it’s hard not to be cynical about blockchain as a technology. Resisting that urge, I’ve spent some time over the past few months thinking about when, if ever, blockchain might make sense. It’s true that blockchain has some...

Google wants to make the App Store a second-class citizen. This much is clear from the features the company has been rolling out over the past few months, most notably at this year’s IO conference. Let’s take them one at a time: Instant Apps have been around since 2016 in one form or another, but Google continues to expand the offering. In a nutshell, an Instant App lets users run an application simply by clicking...

It’s easy to find plenty of articles like this one that tout Amazon’s lead in the smart-speaker category. They are all fundamentally missing the point. Smart speakers are simply the newest front in the battle of the voice assistants. In other words, Google Assistant is what’s important; the Google Home is only relevant insofar as it gets more people using Assistant. Ditto for Alexa and the Echo. Amazon’s continued discounting of the hardware, alongside its...

I’ve always thought that you can learn a lot about somebody from what they’re willing to recommend. What content we consume is one matter, but making a recommendation carries a reputational risk. So what better way to kick this site off than a few solid recommendations? Fiction I cannot possibly recommend The Kingkiller Chronicle highly enough. Patrick Rothfuss is a true master of prose, and he spins a story as beautiful and intricate as any...